Wyndham Lewis's big mistake

Yes, he was a fascist sympathiser, but the firebrand vorticist Wyndham Lewis is still one of our finest portraitists

Wyndham Lewis supported Hitler. I mention it straightaway , because I don't want it looming up later to shipwreck my praise. Supporting Hitler - writing books in favour of the Führer - was Lewis's greatest mistake as a controversialist. It ruined his reputation as an artist, turned him into a national hate figure and ensured that nobody would ever again take him seriously as a thinker. Thus, in some perverse way, it constitutes an appropriately sized mistake for a man of his gigantic, noisy, unbalanced presence. Some people drop clangers. Lewis dropped the entire carillon of bells.

The Hitler book is now lying innocently enough in a case at the centre of the National Portrait Gallery's feisty little survey of Lewis's portraiture. It has an assortment of punchy swastikas on the cover, redesigned at sharp, vorticist angles: the modernist swastika, no less. It's full of nonsense about Hitler being "a man of peace"